The Curious Case of the Tea in the Nighttime
by UnstableIntention
Summary: When it finally happened, Stiles was only surprised that it hadn't happened before.


Stiles often visited his mother's grave at night, when the cemetery was still and quiet. It was a pain really - to sneak out of the house and cross town to the edge of the Preserve in the dark, to find that place along the stone wall where he could lever himself up and shimmy over the wrought iron fence that circled the graveyard - but it was worth it in the end. Worth the extra effort because with the entry gates chained shut there was little chance anyone else would be there.

And it was better when no one was there.

Easier.

Easier to walk with his head up and count the rows back to her little plot without feeling the eyes of others following him - his friends and neighbors, the citizens of Beacon Hills who remembered the local Sheriff's wife and the little boy who had become wild and unruly after his mother's death, even though there was an empty stillness in his heart. Easier too, to visit without his father's knowledge, without having to face the task of asking him if he'd like to come along while knowing, truly knowing in his heart that the man would shake his head, clear his throat and promise tightly that he would the next time. Knowing that it was a promise that would likely forever go unfulfilled.

So he went at night, when the streets were calm and deserted and he could take all the time he needed to breathe in the cool damp air, all the time he needed for the tears to stream silently down his face without having to scrub them surreptitiously away.

Some nights he brought flowers. Not the kind from the store, but the wild kind that grew in the ditches and out along the edges of the woods, tangled and knotted and unidentifiable. They always felt more honest than hothouse roses, or tulips with colors so strong they looked like they'd been painted in with oil pastels. More natural and right. He would take his time putting together a bouquet, making no-nevermind about the less-than-perfect ones with their uneven petals or tattered stamens, knotting the stems together with a bit of sweet-smelling tall grass.

It was the kind of arrangement his father had brought home sometimes after work, the kind he remembered his mother tucking lovingly into an old glass vase in the center of the kitchen table when he was young, and it was that same vase that he cleaned carefully each time he visited, changing out dried and faded blooms for new ones.

Some nights, too, he brought letters, sealed carefully inside standard-sized envelopes that glowed stark white in the dark. He had less control over them than he did over other things, unable to either stem or encourage the flow of words whenever he chose to put pen to paper. He couldn't remember when or why he started writing things down, but he suspected that it was because in this singular instance, he found it easier to write than talk.

He was rarely careful of what he wrote. A single line or an essay pages long, he didn't care for grammar or syntax. It was just a way to better understand himself, a free flow of ideas that turned fleeting emotion and rapid thought into something more tangible. He felt better when he could see it laid out in front of him, blue or black or red scrawled so hard across the page that he could trace the pads of his fingers along the lines of the paper and _feel _the words, words that spoke of all the things he wished he could say to her, important or not. Everything, from the mundane little details of his day-to-day life to how much he loved and missed her. Of his good days, spent with his friends and the pack, and of the bad too, when he ached so much for what might have been he could feel it like a spike through his chest. He wrote about his father, and how they cared for each other so closely, dragging each other up again when they fell.

Mostly he just told her that they were all right.

Other nights he brought nothing at all, only himself to offer. He always felt strange going to her with empty hands, because somehow it felt more like penance, like he should be dropping to his knees and praying at her gravestone with folded hands as though it were an altar. On those nights he felt stuck inside his skin, his blood too hot in his veins, and he rarely stayed long lest he be overcome with the insatiable need to _move_, the image of splaying himself out as sacrifice on a cool stone slab haunting the shadows of his thoughts.

It was nights like those that he wished he hadn't come, unnerved by the quiet rows of death markers as he left and unsettled for days after.

Nights like those he got no comfort from the black granite reminder of what he'd lost, left with nothing but the too-sweet scent of hospital in his nose and the taste of cherry Jell-O in his mouth.

But not all nights were bad.

Some nights were beautiful, clear and calm where the stars shone brightly down like chips of diamond in an obsidian sky, the breeze cool and clean against his skin. Nights like those he brought a thermos of strong, fragrant, Oolong tea, brewed in his mom's dented old kettle long after his father had gone to bed. He kept the leaves and her little submarine-shaped infuser hidden in the back of a cupboard inside an old box of Quinoa, the scent of it a powerful reminder of rainy days when the Stilinski's all settled into the front room together with a deck of cards or a book.

Nights like those he stayed, splayed out on the grass until the sun was almost up, the tea just hot and sweet enough to dissolve the lump in his throat that he might speak again.

Tonight was one of those nights, and Stiles had doubled up on his hoodies in anticipation of the chill that was sure to fall once night had really set. He'd wrapped his thermos in a small blanket before stuffing it into an athletic bag, and it was resting snug and warm between his shoulders as he walked, a pleasant weight at his back. The pavement was still damp from the recent rain, reflecting the yellowy-orange light of the streetlamps overhead - a little too stark and artificial on his nerves - so he left the sidewalks for the abandoned lots and empty fields that he'd explored all his childhood, the ones he knew just as well as the blocks and side streets he'd been raised on.

He felt freer there, rambling through the trees and patches of low bramble as the forest began to thicken around him, the Preserve edging in on civilization all dark and wild and wooded, and sometimes he wondered why that was but not tonight. Tonight he just let himself be, breathed in the cool, loamy air, damp on his wrists where he'd pushed up his sleeves. Eventually he found the wall, the stone pale and silvery under the watery moonlight that trickled down through the trees, dappled and dancing as the breeze pushed through the leaves, rustling them quietly. There was a playfulness in him tonight so he leapt up onto the long, low barrier, throwing his arms out to either side to keep his balance and tripping carefully along, one foot in front of the other as he hummed the chorus to Good Charlotte's _Thank You Mom_.

He was surprised that he made it to the place between the trees where the wall met the wrought iron fence without toppling off and braining himself senseless. He was usually a little more uncoordinated than that. Still, the warm stretch and burn in his muscles as he grabbed the spiked bars and pulled himself up and over felt good. Even the jolt in his bones felt good when he hit the ground on the other side, keeping his knees loose so that he landed in easy crouch. From there it was a short three over and five up to the little lane of pea gravel that cut through the rows, down to the giant stone angel that guarded over Ms. Rosalind Blythe, the richest eccentric to ever grace Beacon Hills. Six markers diagonally and you hit the massive oak tree that grew between the two car paths.

It occurred to him as he came level with the tree that he thought of the cemetery in the same way he thought of his chessboard, all spaces and players, and it sent a shiver down his spine because he was the only piece that ever moved, the only piece that ever the board.

Except…

Maybe it was that elusive sixth sense, or maybe it was spending so much time with werewolves, but something had the hair on the back of his neck standing up as he neared the tree, something whispering just beyond the edges of his human hearing.

Now, Stiles didn't believe in ghosts. Even with all the things he'd seen and all the nightmares he'd lived, ghosts were maybe the one thing he couldn't reconcile. Because if there were such things as ghosts, why hadn't…

Never mind.

No such thing as ghosts.

Still, if there were, he thought that this might be where you'd find them. He'd passed this place before of course, known what it was. How could he not, what with the double rows of neat, matching grave markers all cut with matching death-dates? Talia and David, Nicholas and Benjamin and Sarah, Hale after Hale after Hale, so many that it made his stomach lurch. He'd never stopped; it had felt too much like intrusion, too much like stumbling on to a secret that he wasn't meant to know, so he had always just swallowed down the lump in his throat and kept moving.

Tonight something else moved.

Something that started out small and dark, low to the ground near the base of the newest stone - the one that hadn't been here as long as the others and was carved from pink quartz instead of the matching glass and granite - but then loomed up huge and broad and leather-clad, eyes glowing like ruby coals in the night, a black rook to his lighter pawn.

Stiles didn't have time to swallow his heart back down into his chest where it belonged before he was being thrown into the tree, yelping when his thermos bit into his lower back, and then there was a strong, heavy forearm pressing hard into his collar bones, claws gripping his hoodie at the shoulder and holding him down tight against the thick trunk. Sharp fangs showed white in the dark as a blood-chilling snarl rattled his bones, but the scents of coffee and peppermint and sawdust had assaulted him too, and the adrenaline and fear that had spiked in his blood immediately gave way to a low simmer, even as he tried and failed to check his swing and his fist was caught in an iron grip, a biting bracelet around his wrist that slammed his hand back against the rough, wet bark of the tree at his side.

Even minus the eyebrows of doom, Stiles knew exactly how it felt to be slammed up against something with that body pressed close to his, with that strong smell in his nose, all clean and male and _Derek_.

"What the hell are you doing here Stiles?" he snarled, his eyes still glowing bright in the dark, but Stiles could hear the tightness in his throat, the tears he was trying so hard to choke down, and in that moment all the reality of what his presence here meant came crashing down on him with the force of an ocean wave, leaving him with the distinct impression that he'd been dropped into the Pacific without a life raft.

And while Stiles certainly knew just how painful it was to drown, he'd do it all over again before he laid down his right to be here.

"The same thing as you, you jerk," he hissed, shoving futilely at the werewolf's chest with his free hand. "Put. Me. _Down_."

He could see the moment that things clicked, physically see it, because the Alpha glare in Derek's eyes died as shame and horror came flooding in, his face going stunned and white as he dropped Stiles like a hot potato. Luckily the oak tree was there to catch him, because his sneakers had been dangling a good two inches off the ground while Mr. Muscles held him aloft like he wasn't a hundred and forty seven pounds of pale and clumsy. Straightening up again, he righted his rumpled hoodies with a haughty flick of his lapels, tossing the chastened wolf a glare.

It went unheeded, because Derek was staring dumbly down at his shoes, and Stiles suspected that if the light were just a bit better there might be some pink to the tips of his ears. In that moment he looked younger and more vulnerable than Stiles had ever seen him, and it was a brutal reminder that all he really was was a broken young man only a few years older than himself who had suffered greater loss than he could ever imagine. A broken young man who was just doing the best that he possibly could in a role he was never meant to fill.

The stones that hovered in silent rows behind him were a grim testament to that.

"Sorry," he murmured quietly as he lifted his head, and Stiles saw his eyes flick off to the left, in the direction that he had originally been heading.

Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he shifted awkwardly on his feet, uncomfortable with any sort of apology coming from the so-often broody and bitter werewolf, but even more so because it felt like he was apologizing for more than the snatch-and-slam routine. Heck, that was old hat for them, practically foreplay, and God wasn't that a creepy analogy to make in the middle of a graveyard…

"I should… go."

"Wait, what?" Stiles deadpanned stupidly, pulled out of his own head by the quiet, hesitant mumble.

Derek watched him quietly, his face still tipped down towards the earth, and there was a wounded stillness in him that Stiles was horribly acquainted with. Sighing, he dragged a hand through his hair, hit with the sudden impression that the spare two yards between them were a problem it was his responsibility to fix. It was clear he'd interrupted something deeply private, and he knew well enough from his own feelings that it was highly unlikely that Derek would stay now that he was there.

"You don't… look you don't have to go because of me," he tried, but from the look on Derek's face he wasn't doing as much convincing as he'd hoped to. "You can stay, I'm just…" Here he chuckled softly, a melancholy sort of smile on his face as he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. "I'm just gonna go cry for twenty and then I'll be out of your hair."

He didn't know why he'd said it. He hadn't felt like crying when he'd set out from his father's house that night, or when he'd landed on this side of the cemetery's fence, but there was a dull, haunting ache in him now hovering round near his heart, and he could feel the familiar pressure building in his chest that could only ever be pulled out by hard, gut-wrenching sobs.

"You cry for her?"

"Course," Stiles responded automatically, startled and disconcerted by the quiet question, too gentle out of a mouth so often hard and gruff. "Don't you?"

He might have reacted more defensively if it weren't for the forlorn sort of huff in Derek's voice, the heavily tempered, morbid curiosity, but once again he felt like there was more being said than was being spoken, more at stake than the destruction of the last bits of his dignity and manhood. Still, as comparatively gentle as his words had been, they seemed to strike a painful chord in the werewolf's chest, because his eyes flared in the dark as he swallowed hard and turned away.

"I've tried," he said with a shrug, taking a few slow steps, and this time his voice was strong and firm and level as he collected up the steel wires of his strength and his composure. "Lot's of times…"

Some invisible cord seemed to have a hold on Stiles, because instead of making good an escape, getting down to his mother's plot for a quick _hi-loveyou-bye_ and then getting gone, he followed along at Derek's side, down the row to stand before Talia and David Hale with their hands deep in their pockets as if awaiting judgment, and it was quite possible that Derek was. The man was a walking, talking ball of guilt and man-pain, and while Stiles could definitely see the logic and even some of the merit behind it, far more of him felt sickened by the sheer amount of unwarranted self-flagellation that scarred the wolf anew each and every day.

"Hey, to each their own dude," he said quietly, trying to do the impossible by being supportive and unobtrusive at the same time. "I'm a talker and a crier but so what - that's just me. Everybody colors grief differently."

"Don't call me dude," Derek muttered off-handedly, and the barest smile lit at the corner of Stiles' mouth as he rolled his eyes. Reaching out, he touched his mother's headstone reverently before moving back down the line, his stride impressively smooth even as he counted off his dead one by one.

"And besides,' he tossed over his shoulder, clearly operating under the assumption that it was only natural for Stiles to be following along.

It was anything but natural.

He felt like he was walking through a dream state, a parallel world where everything was different but nothing at all had changed, and then Stiles found himself standing in front of Laura Hale's grave and the pale pink stone that her brother had chosen after all the murder accusations had fallen away and she had been declared officially deceased, her body recovered and moved to the family plot. He'd heard from his father that no one had attended the burial, only Derek, the last Hale left to mourn alone with a breaking heart as he watched just one more person he loved being lowered into the earth forever.

"Besides," he continued, "Being here. Coming here. It's not about me."

"What then?" Stiles asked, because for him his nighttime visits were an entirely selfish act. He came for his own sanity, for his own heart and emotions, to make _himself_ feel better. It was hard to understand any other way. "Keeping up appearances?"

Derek scoffed and looked away, off into the darkness.

"Makes sense," Stiles defended. On a whim, and with the feeling that this might be a much longer night than he'd originally anticipated, he shrugged out of his backpack and withdrew his bleacher blanket, shaking it out over the damp grass in front of Laura's marker and folding his legs beneath him so that he sank down onto the corner Indian style. "Big bad wolf. Can't let the world see him cry."

Derek cocked an eyebrow, looking down at him with a sudden clear discomfort, as though he had only just taken real notice of Stiles' presence and where they were, but he solidly ignored it.

"I don't care what the world thinks," he said, taken aback. "I told you. I've tried to…"

"Why?" Stiles asked, and it came out sharp and demanding and Derek's head snapped up as he narrowed his eyes, Stiles' real question finally driving home.

"Because they deserve it!" he snapped, and the answer seemed to stun him more than it should've. He went white, almost fearful, as though he'd scared himself with the admission, and he crumpled down onto the blanket at Stiles' side like his knees had given out. Drawing them in towards his chest, he propped up his elbow and dropped his head into his hands and if Stiles weren't far too aware of exactly who was sitting across from him, he might have thought he'd seen those hands tremble.

"Because they deserve it," the werewolf said again, and this time it was a choked, broken whisper, only a half-step away from a sob. "They deserve that from me."

And there it was.

Stiles came for himself.

Derek came for his family.

And in a way he supposed they weren't so different, because there was a rock in his throat that he was willing to bet mirrored the one in the werewolf's perfectly.

So he did the only thing he knew to do - he retrieved his thermos and poured, breathing in the fragrant steam before taking that first strong, warming sip and handing the plastic cap with the little handle over to Derek. The werewolf's hesitancy didn't last, and until the sun rose again no more passed between them than silence and hot, earthy tea.


End file.
